Adventures of a shutterbug

Main menu

Tag Archives: drought

Issac came along and pretty much ended a summer of drought in the Ozarks. We didn’t get a lot of rain, but it was a nice slow soaking – 3 inches over a couple of days. My grass came back to life and I considered mowing it for the first time since mid May. I noticed some large white blobs over by my cedar tree while I was clearing limbs while getting ready to mow.

I saw several odd round turban-shaped mushrooms underneath the cedar tree. They were growing in a circle about 6 feet across. A friend told me that this was called a fairy circle, for me it was an excuse to put off mowing another week while I waited to see its progress. It was also an excuse to take some photos of something living. Drought = no wildflowers, no lawn, no color. Imagine my excitement at seeing white blobs!

This shot is misleading – they are not actually larger than my terrier Velcro in the background, but they were quite large. Baseball-sized fungi…

The fungi surface looked like flan that had been stretched to reveal a plush and fuzzy sub-layer.

Over the course of the next 24 hours the ball opened and flattened into a disk the size of a salad plate. Perfectly round like one of those parasols you get in a fancy drink, only not so fun and colorful…

All-in-all they were kind of boring, but you gotta work with what nature gives you. I thought I would try to impose some artsy angles on them to make them appear more dramatic. I got very dirty doing this.

The details of their gills were pretty amazing – there are spider webs in there, or maybe tiny cob webs – a tiny microcosm…

This is the view a field mouse or packrat might have as they approach one of these babies – reaching for the sky. I got very dirty getting this shot. I also was bitten by chiggers. There’s nothing I won’t do for art…

Eye level to a rabbit, if my dogs would let a rabbit get this close.

Enough already, I’m putting on some calamine and getting out the mower!

I was putting together the pieces of a longer post when the rain started.

If you’ve read any of my posts lamenting the drought in the Ozarks, you know that rain is a reason for rejoicing! I was working on a bird feeder repair in the kitchen when I looked out the window and saw this:

A female hummer enjoying the shower…

She started to spin and do her best impression of a turkey with a glance to the right…

then a twist to the left…

followed by a whole lotta shakin’

The rain gauge is filling up, the grass is starting to green up, the hummers are dancing, all is right with the world.

An Ozark Spring starts with plentiful rains followed by waves of colors – vivid and saturated like a box of crayons. Forsythias, red buds, dogwoods, violets, daffodils….on and on from late March through August.

Like much of the south, the Ozarks are under pretty extreme drought conditions this year. The season started well and just stopped in mid May. Except for some roadside chicory, the color is all but gone. The field grasses are yellow, the earth is crunchy. I miss my crayons….

Fuscia

Red

Purple

Yellow

Pink

White

Blue

Green

Violet

I know that the drought, like all things, will pass. The colors will be back.